The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(5)
“You’d be surprised. I have some really good card tricks.”
Eric watched me go. As I continued down the tunnel, the glow from his lamp fading at my back, a sense of cool confidence washed over me. Black widows were one thing, but ghosts? Ghosts I could deal with.
Your typical ghost is just a psychic imprint. They’re the aftermath of trauma, despair, an emotion so strong that it doesn’t die with the person experiencing it. Scary, but about as dangerous as a filmstrip. If Stacy’s murder created an after-impression, I might be able to learn something from it. If nothing else, I could at least banish it and do Eric and his buddies a favor. They had enough ghosts of their own to wrestle with.
Scraps of detritus cluttered the tunnel floor. My flashlight beam flickered across a broken hockey stick, a few plastic bags, a grocery cart lying on its side with one wheel slowly turning in a half-felt draft. I looked back to the middle of the tunnel and froze.
A black plastic sphere sat in the center of the floor, looking less abandoned than carefully placed there, like a prop in a canceled play. I crouched down to pick it up, finally recognizing it as one of those old Magic 8 Ball toys. Taken by a whim, I gave it a shake.
“Is anyone down here?” I asked and then flipped it over. Through a scratched plastic window, I was greeted with the words “Answer hazy, ask again later.” I chuckled and moved to put it back down.
Then the ball jerked in my hand, and the answer flipped to “Yes.”
The sphere tumbled from my fingers, cracked against the concrete, and bounced into the dark. I slipped a deck of cards from my pocket and gave them a slow, overhand shuffle as I walked deeper into the tunnel. The sinuous riffling of the pasteboard in my hands helped me concentrate.
“All right,” I said to the shadows, “we can do it that way.”
The underground air had felt damp and cool, like a day in late autumn. Now winter gusted in. A chilling breeze rubbed up against my spine and turned my breath to frost just before the smell hit me. The stench of raw sewage swelled up like someone had opened a cesspool right under my feet. My stomach lurched, and I struggled to breathe as I flipped over the top card of my deck. Queen of spades. I shuffled it back in.
The flashlight beam flickered across a recessed alcove in the tunnel wall. Stringy blond hair, a naked shoulder, bloodless lips. With a whispering rasp, Stacy came out to greet me.
Not all of her, though.
Jud Pankow’s murdered granddaughter hovered in the beam of my flashlight, a shambling twitch in her step, staring at me with mad eyes the color of silver dollars. One of her arms was missing. And half a leg. And an oval chunk of her stomach that looked like it had been scooped out with a precision saw. There was no blood, no gore, not even the hint of a wound. Her body just stopped here and there, like pieces of her had been edited out of existence.
I knew she couldn’t really hurt me, that this was nothing but the memory of Stacy’s pain given form and life, but my mouth still went dry. I tried to remember the words of an old Louisiana folk-charm, one I’d used before to put an apparition to rest.
Stacy wrenched her mouth open, her jaw quaking, and rivulets of water poured down her chin, spattering on the concrete floor. Then she screamed and taught me how little I really knew about ghosts.
Her shriek felt like a pair of razorblades slashing across my eardrums, borne on a wind of raw anguish. I staggered back, reeling under a blast of horror given focus and form. Fingers of despair and betrayal clawed at my mind, trying to infect me with her pain, to consume me with it.
I answered on instinct. I passed my free hand over the deck, the jack of diamonds leaping to my fingertips, and I flung it at her. The card caught the Stacy-thing in the shoulder and flew through her, pulsing with a flash of violent purple light. The apparition flailed, its cry cut short, and I reached out to catch the jack as it whirled its way back to my hand.
Like I told Eric, I knew some good card tricks. Not good enough for this, though. I felt like a boxer who expected to go a few rounds with a welterweight only to find himself staring down Mike Tyson. I needed to figure out what the hell this thing was and come up with a plan to take it down before it hurt someone, none of which I could do while it was trying to kill me.
I drew another card, tracing the seal of Saturn across its face with my thumb and flipping it into the air. It hung there as if dangling from an invisible thread, a tiny cardboard barrier between me and the Stacy-thing. The apparition reared back, unleashing another scream, but it didn’t touch me. All I saw was the card vibrating in the air, absorbing the lethal torrent.
The card ignited.
Running, I had almost made it to the mouth of the tunnel when a third scream hit me from behind. My hands seized up and sent cards scattering around my feet, useless and inert. My stomach constricted. I dropped to one knee, doubling over, vomiting up a torrent of brackish water as fuzzy black spots flooded my vision. I was drowning in reverse, my air cut off by the flood, my hands scrabbling at the tunnel floor in desperation. Half blind with blood roaring in my ears, I closed my fingers around a fallen card and filled it with the last spark of my power, flinging it into the air.
The torrent stopped. Hacking up spurts of water, I forced myself to my feet. The new shield-card was already vibrating, its power fragmenting by the second. Stumbling to the tunnel wall, I tugged a leather pouch from my hip pocket and tore it open, nearly dropping it from my trembling fingers. I poured out a thin trail of powder, jagged but unbroken, from one side of the tunnel to the other and finished just as the card burst into flames.